Saturday, September 15, 2012

All Writers Should Be Funny-Looking and All Stories Should Be Funny

'Mr. Lafferty says, "I'm the fellow who, for more than a quarter century, has faithfully maintained the thesis that all writers should be funny-looking and all stories should be funny. Almost all of the evil in the world is brought about by handsome writers doing pompous pieces. But sometimes readers tell me that such a story of mine is not funny at all. 'Wait, wait,' I tell them. 'You're holding it upside-down. Now try it.' And sure enough it is funny if they get ahold of it right. This caution is especially applicable to the story 'Junkyard Thoughts.' Be sure you're not holding it upside-down or it will be merely bewildering."'

I'm blown away how many Lafferties there are in Asimov's in the 80s. He's supposed to have faded out of the s.f. mainstream in that era, but he had quite a run in this mag during that decade. Great stuff too.

Although it has nothing to do with anything here, this is a note to leet people know that a copy of the three volumes of More than Melcisedech can be found at http://www.coldtonnage.com/?CLSN_3127=1348204054312781fd9fc2c70eb6f3ab&keyword=lafferty&searchby=author&page=shop%2Fbrowse&fsb=1. Cost is £225 which is a lot but not a bad price.

Thanks for the tip, Philip! You're right, that's a great price. If I had that kind of extra cash, I'd snatch 'em up in a heartbeat! Here's hoping to see them being re-issued at affordable price in the next decade or so!

This is a great sentiment from Lafferty. I must say though, I was surprised at how much darker and horror-oriented Strange Doings was compared to some of his other works. It was funny at times, for sure, but it was significantly less light-hearted than, for example, Nine Hundred Grandmothers.

Good point, Antonin. I've increasingly seen 'horror' as one of the main genres that Lafferty is working in. In fact, now that you've noticed it in Strange Doings, I bet if you go back and re-read 900 Grandmothers, you'll find there was a whole lot more of it there than you'd noticed the first time. (And as he warns in the quote above, even the story at hand, 'Junkyard Thoughts', is quite dark and has sort of a horror ending. Apparently, you have to, as he says, get ahold of it right to see that it's funny.)

Lafferty seems to me to have essentially been something like a 'horror comedy' writer (not in the sense that might bring to mind from movies of that sort of genre). Some of his stories are darkly comic 'jeremiads', warning of and bemoaning loss of our humanity due to spiritual and cultural forces Lafferty saw diminishing us. Some of it is more 'carnivalesque', which is hopeful, a sort of grotesque rebirthing and redemption. (Andrew Ferguson's dissertation 'Lafferty and His World' helpfully unpacks the carnivalesque in Lafferty's fiction - easily found by googling it.)

Thanks for the link Philip--I ran across this one in the Liverpool archives but only had a photocopy of it.

I find it a bit limited, sadly—Don Webb's short piece from the same year on "Effective Arcanum" is much meatier; Roman Orszanski's piece on "The Sound of Lafferty" covers the same ground with more depth; and Sheryl Smith's explication of the "Easterwine" structure makes mockery of her claim (and Clute's, incidentally) that the book is in any way incoherent.

(Really, I don't get why so many otherwise good readers are so bound up with the idea that plot is the sole possible organizing principle for a novel. Why shouldn't it be idea based? The preference for plot over all else is an invention of the last 200 years or so, yet it seems ineradicable.)

Still, as an appreciation and celebration of what hooks many into Lafferty, and brings them back for more, it does its job.

OK, utterly off topic here: I just read "Golden Gate" the title story of Golden Gate and Other Stories (Thank God for interlibrary loan--this is signed copy number 742/1000). Quick question and observation on the story: Is there a thematic similarity between "Golden Gate" and "Continued on Next Rock?" At the end "Golden Gate" implies that it is a melodrama that will be tried out time and time again and has perhaps been going on for a very long time--a conflict of personifications of Good and Evil. "Continued on Next Rock" is about the unrequited love story that plays out time and time again through all past and future history. In "Continued on Next Rock" the focus is more on the timeless repetition, while in golden Gate, the focus is on the melodrama and the passion. The timelessness is only implied.

They'd kill the Stutgards first, that very night, with axes. They'd axe old man Stutgard, and all the blood would run out of his bi...

'Regular people have sealed off the interior ocean that used to be in every man... They closed the ocean and ground up its monsters for fertilizer. That is why we so often enter into peoples' dreams. We take the place of the monsters they have lost.' (R. A. Lafferty, Past Master)

'My program is simple: I battle that pair of insufficiencies, Humanism which has no meat, and Materialism which has no bones... I have no faith at all in Engineered Humanity. I am neither humanist nor materialist. I am a heretic... Whether there be Things Beyond I do not know. Ye'd forbid the mind to consider them. I forbid the forbidding.' (R. A. Lafferty, Past Master)

'And the people, of course, are no help in the saving of the people... No, Miss Doll. The people are but sheep. They graze on catch-words, and they go to their slaughter.'(R. A. Lafferty, The Devil is Dead)

It’s hilarious, incredibly funny and at the same time it’s insanely dark... You get such a sense of joy and boundless imagination in every sentence – even if the story doesn’t totally cohere, you feel like it’s about something. It’s so incredibly Tulsa. You get that feeling when you see a Flaming Lips show. It’s not like we’re dark and hurt and twisted. It’s like, “I’ve got blood on my face – come on, y’all, this is awesome.”

Feel free to stay in touch with my varied writings on theology, fiction, monsters and more:

About Me

I formally study English Literature & Philosophy at the University of Glasgow. I independently study Theology and try to learn the craft of Writing. (I had my first story published in the August 2013, issue 21, of Fungi: The Magazine of Weird Fiction & Fantasy.) I'm interested in R. A. Lafferty, Cormac McCarthy, H. P. Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, Charles Williams, George MacDonald, Black Elk, G. K. Chesterton, Gene Wolfe, Michael Bishop, Cordwainer Smith, George Mackay Brown, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, Stephen Graham Jones, & Colson Whitehead (among many others). In the 1990s and 2000s I 'sang' in the punk/post-punk bands Blaster the Rocket Man and Voice of the Mysterons. I'm married to Andrea and we have five children, aged 4 to 18. (Specific research interests include: theology of darkness, theology of monsters, theology of horror, theology of transmogrification, theological ecology, theistic weird fiction, haunted ontology [anti-reductionism in metaphysics], & 'weird realism'.)